Hey everyone,

As you’ve probably noticed we are still not at 30 members.  We have been using “open” wars (no assigned BGs) for a few wars with mixed success.  Managing two BGs of random people creates a few difficulties:

1. BG Generals need to rethink the paths for each war because which summoners are available to attack isn’t known until attack almost starts
2. Summoners get moved to different paths frequently which makes it difficult to become accustomed to a route and the nodes you will see on it (one example, not realizing your path requires a bleed immune champ)
3. Defensive diversity is difficult to maintain
4. Defensive placement is complex because the available champs change each war as summoners change in and out.  Determining the best boss, the best minibosses etc takes time

 

The plan for the near future is to continue 2 BG wars but we will try a different approach.  We will use our assigned BGs but each BG will get 1 day off each week.

• Wednesday Night War search – BG1 and BG2 place but BG3 takes the day off
• Friday Night War Search – BG2 and BG3 place but BG1 takes the day off
• Sunday Night War Search – BG1 and BG3 place but BG2 takes the day off

If one of the BGs is short because we are under 30 people then one of the officers will fill in the hole.  If you are assigned to a BG but unable to participate in your war (example, vacation) please reach out to one of the officers to get coverage.

This will allow us to keep set diversity and regular paths for people but still work only two BGs.

Lots of things have changed in this new season of AQ.

• Kang has been replaced by Dormamu as boss
• The mini-bosses will change up every week [this week quake was our nemesis]
• Map 4 no longer has 9 paths in section 3 so the difficulty is more manageable
• They changed the constant re-tiering and reduced the number of brackets to 3
• They introduced a new currency called glory which you can use to buy the things you most need.  Most notably full t4b and t4cc shards.

Overall these changes will be very good for our alliance.  The old system made it incredibly difficult for alliances not in the top to even get t4cc shards

With these changes we are in the middle of the three tiers: advanced.  We scored 11M points this week [5-6-17] and ranked around 2200.

We also reached the first 8 milestones.

In the end we received at least 8 map-3 crystals and 4 map-4 crystals.  Plus 13k t4b shards and 1080 glory.  This was a pretty good haul.  Eventually we will be able to clear 2 BGs regularly in map 3 and map 4 and the rewards will get better.

Personally I spent 1050 glory on 2 glory crystals and got 7200 t4 tech shards.

Some people in the alliance have a dedicated AQ team that does not conflict with their AW team but not everyone does.   So completing map 4 on days where we are at war is difficult [I did screw up once and accidentally started it on war day. We were able to clear 1 BG by putting all our strongest on 1 group].  We will start with doing map 4 twice a week on non war days so either 34343 or 43433 depending on whether aq day 1 is a war day or not.

BG1 and BG2 should mirror the alliance war assignments so we can make sure we have enough strong people in each group to clear the bosses.  Everyone should join a group and help get points because 1) you get a share of the reward and 2) every point helps toward our final ranking.

As I just updated in the alliance rules we need to start requiring donations to keep running map 4.  Our weekly requirement will be 40,000 gold and 2,000 loyalty.  You can make this easy by just donating whatever prize you get when we complete each map.
For reference below are some duel targets you can use to practice for the boss and mini bosses we will face now.

This is a summary page to try and pull together important information for new members.

The first key item is that you must join our Line groups.  If you haven’t already, download the Line app [android, iPhone] and create an account.  Preferably set your display name the same as your in-game ID.  Search for OriginalBassMan and add as a friend.  I can then get you invites to the key chat rooms:

• Spider Pigs General chat – Announcements, game help and discussion, and just being friendly
• An individual chat for your assigned BattleGroup – this is very active during aq and AW as we talk about paths, who needs help, notice of when nodes are cleared etc.
• Announcements – this is not for general discussion.  This is for officers to make announcements of interest to the alliance.  Reminders about events, BG assignment changes etc.
• [Optional] training group – this is a room where our more seasoned fighters share knowledge with those needing to grow their fighting technique.

Here are the alliance rules

Here is a summary on this season of alliance quest

Here is how we work Attack phase in Alliance Wars [this post will be rewritten once we understand the new aw nodes, paths and strategy]
For wars and aq everyone is assigned a BattleGroup.  There is a blog page where we keep these assignments captured…  Your bg will have an assigned general to coordinate paths and strategy.  You will have a dedicated chat room for your BG that will be used for both AW and AQ.

Other useful tips:

Arena Streaks

How Summoner Advancement Works

 

 

 

 

Here is a map that shows all of the node paths. We will refer to these path numbers going forward. Note that there are two maps.  a 6 path map and an 8 path map.  Depending on our war tier (and to accommodate when people are away from the game for things like vacation) we sometimes alternate between these two maps.  Make sure you know which map your BG general is using to make assignments.

 

For each Battle group the GB general will assign every member of the battle group a role prior to the start of the attack phase.  Please make sure you check your assignment before joining the offense.

• 6 (or 8 depending on the map) people will be assigned a specific line to clear (remember to wait for link to be taken down before attacking!)
• 4 (or 2 depending on the map) people will be assigned to sit at the beginning and wait until we see how the other paths are doing.  You are the Cavalry; someone will need backup to finish their path.

Once you know your path, study the nodes.  You can look at the nodes on your path to see what buffs you will face.  For example, on path 3 you will face a bleed node that will drain all of your health in 60 seconds unless you bring a bleed-immune champ with you.

If you are in the cavalry check back (on Line) often to see if you are needed to help clear a path or if you are free to go for exploration.  In many wars exploration percentage and defensive diversity are what make the difference.  Priority one is making sure we can get to the boss and take it down but priority 2 is getting all the possible exploration.  Pay close attention to the paths on the maps and follow them so that the cavalry can clear all the missing exploration if possible.

Hey all, lots of things have gone on over the last week that I wanted to touch on the highs and the lows and what we’ve learned.  Rather lengthy details in here about some AQ and AW thoughts.  Apologies but I started to get tired and I’m not going back to proofread tonight.

1. Alliance Wars

We lost 3 in a row.  I understand that can be frustrating but there a few things to consider before we get too upset and start making drastic plans.

First, we are trying to learn how to best organize ourselves which will allow us to beat stronger opponents once we figure it out.  We had some planning and communication struggles on the assignments but I really think this will up our game once we get it right.  We are learning better the capabilities of each of our fighters and this is allowing us to refine our assignments.  We are also taking a lot of guidance from some of our members that have a stronger account in a more powerful alliance; we can learn from what they know and apply it.

Second, we are in a really awkward spot power-wise.  If you don’t know how war rewards work I will give you a little detail.  There are a total of 20 different war tiers.  As you win and lose wars your “war rating” goes up or down.  Your total war rating when you start a war search determines your rewards tier.  The rewards tier also determines the map strength and the relative strength of your opponent.  We seem to toggle between tier 7 and tier 8.  At tier 7 the  class of your opponents are hidden and some of the nodes boosts are more powerful so the fights here are harder three different ways: 1) Harder opponent, 2) hidden class and 3) stronger boosts.

We tend to do really good when at tier 8 and get promoted to tier 7.  Once in tier 7 we win occasionally but struggle.  So we are a strong tier 8 alliance but weak at tier 7.  The last 3 consecutive losses were at tier 7 and now we are at tier 8.  Eventually if we keep working on getting stronger and organizing better the tier 7 wars will become more manageable.

2. Item use

Item use started today so burn through anything that doesn’t impact Summoner Advancement today, but starting tomorrow drop all your signature stones, awakening gems etc.  Lets hit those milestones!

3. Alliance Quest

This is another interesting one that I need to study.  The tiering here is different than AW but we used to toggle between the bottom 2 (Training and Normal).  More on that below.

Your rank up/down depends on how many points you score in the event.  The score is defined by multiple factors:

1. What is your alliance “Prestige” on day 1.  This is why top tier alliances worry a lot about prestige (What is prestige)
2. The map you complete.  Each fight earns points, the points get multiplied by the map difficulty.
3. The number of BGs that you can run increases the number of fights and the total points.

For AQ, we get three kinds of rewards:

crystals for completing maps (which can contain nice rewards, ask Tilt he gets tons of T4cc though I’ve never sniffed one from a map crystal).  The harder the map, the better the potential rewards are for the completion crystal.  Everyone in the alliance that participates in that map gets a reward crystal as long as at least 1 BG gets 100%.

1. Milestone rewards as you earn points.  Milestone values and the rewards are different depending on your AQ tier.
2. Rank rewards based on total score compared to other alliances in your AQ tier

If you recall I said we used to toggle between normal and training every other event.  The tiering is such that unless you are stuck in training you always either move up or down; you do not spend more than one week in a tier.  If you score enough points you get promoted up, if not you get demoted down.  We would score enough one week to get a promotion to normal, then score enough for rank rewards but not enough to move up Peak so we would get demoted again to training.  Over the last few weeks Kabam made maps 4 and 5 free to run.  So everyone’s scores were inflated more than normal so we got stuck in training.  Last week’s run was the first one where all maps had their normal cost and we again got promoted out of training and into normal.

There are wonderful people out there that collect data from fellow players and put together charts (like Arena cutoffs I’m sure you’ve seen).  They also track Alliance Quest Results.  If you look through it, the data for the last few weeks (in normal and training) is much higher because of the free maps.  (if you look at the data, there is also a spike back in december when they made maps free for 2 weeks).  If the older data trends return, we would need to hit 13M to 18M on our week in Normal to get a promotion up.  Based on my tracking we have been hitting 8-9M.

We have been doing map 3 on non-war days and map 2 on war-days…  We typically clear 2 BGs on the first 2-3 days and only 1 BG the last 2 days.  If we want to move up in the tiers we need more consistency across the week.  But we may need to try and tackle the stronger maps.  Either squeeze in a map 4/5 once or twice a week (which requires donations and a lot of coordination as we saw today) or at least hit map 3 all days and actually clear it.  Step 1 though, is to get more consistency in clearing the maps and not fizzling out in the last day or two.

4. Duels

Overall we did pretty good, only a few people did not duel, and we will keep pushing on them.  We hit all but the last milestone.

 

Hello SpiderPigs!

We will use this site to help coordinate activities.  Though Line is good for coordination of ongoing actions, a more permanent site is better for things like assigning BattleGroups for Alliance War and Alliance Quests and coordinating things like hold weeks or open weeks.

I hope everyone is aware of the sad news that our alliance founder WFPF has decided to retire from contest of champions.  His retirement is a big blow, especially since his retirement also takes Ema and BackupAgent with him.  However, we will organize and overcome and carry on the SpiderPig tradition.

We have grown a lot since I joined in late 2016 (and I have grown a lot in that time too).  A rising tide raises all ships so as we all work together we all grow stronger.  One of the things that has really helped us is using Line for communication.  The in-game discussion really sucks for coordinating path assignments in AW/AQ and answering strategy questions.  In that vein I believe we should make utilization of Line a requirement for all new members coming into the ally.  Anyone already here that is a good contributor should get to stay, but new members are required to join us on line.

Tilt will be our AW general.  He seems to watch everyone in AW like a hawk and tracks their progress.  So he will be posting BG assignments for folks. Please stick to them.

I’ll follow up shortly with two other posts that we will sticky…  Alliance rules (nothing really new to folks, just trying to put it down so new members can work with us) and some guidance that I have found useful (acronyms, arena schedule, event schedules etc).